The artists of top anime studios Production IG, Gainax, Madhouse and Bones each provide an image comparing the most iconic characters of their studios – just which studio is victorious is doubtless in the eye of the beholder.

Shaft’s characters weren’t ready in time, and Gonzo ran out of money before starting. Kyoto Animation announced its participation but then delayed before supplying some old pictures of Haruhi.

What are you SMOKING!? Gainax CLEARLY blends better. I think someone needs glasses here. Here take mine, I already decided which one is made of win. And this is coming from a guy who dislikes Gainax products.

They should have included Triangle Staff because of Macross Plus, Slayers, NieA_7 and probably also Serial Experiments Lain. And Manglobe/ Sunrise because of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, along with some good Gundam series like Zeta and probably The 08th MS Team, too.

Madhouse wins for me for including Sakura on the picture. Gainax is second for Abenoboshi and TTGL.
By the way interesting that Gainax only included girls on their picture, while Bones has guys and dogs only.

Just because of evangelion, gainax would win without a doubt. But let’s see…Production I.G. has Ghost in the Shell…Madhouse has all the clamp characters and Vampire Hunter D. Bones has Darker than Black.
In my opinion they all win flawless.

I have to say that Ninja Scroll was pretty decent in what it wanted to accomplish, but imo Vampire Hunter D:Bloodlust was far more stylish and had a great “gothic” atmosphere with interesting characters.

Wouldn’t have picked those pics for the groups myself. Gainax’s KareKano is still my favourite romantic comedy, plus, as much as I think Evangelion was the perennial achievement for teenage intellectual comprehension, they made some shockers, only saving themselves with Guuren Lagaan recently. I mean, no one doubts that the reason they’re remaking Eva isn’t due to faulty story telling initially since they even made the films to patch up the ending, they just don’t have many good ip to push anymore.

I’d have put more onto Cowboy Bebop for Bones, plus the exlusion of Gonzo is odd. I don’t think they make particularly compelling anime but in the early 2000’s they were the popular group.

Kiba and the white thing (I fail for not knowing what it is I know) are interacting. Isn’t it normal for people to pay attention to the camera when posing for a group photo? Thats the feel I get from it.

Well, I can see it mostly depends on the AGE of the beholder. I really like IG the most because their animes (older series indeed) had much more complex stories and were drawn VERY detailed. Some other series by IG were just fun like Patlabor (notice Noah Izumi on the far right of the pic) and were a really big hit on their time. Right now most animes would be considered “moe” to me mostly because compared to other ones I’m talking about they lack that taste of story and character development.

Madhouse did a shitty job with that picture, missing out on stuff like Death Note and Black Lagoon and instead putting in bunch of nobodies (facepalm at Dante). Chi was enough for Clamp stuff.

Gainax don’t produce much anime lately. Their last one was what? TTGL a few years ago? The cream of their crop is Evangelion and that’s ancient and being reused over and over. Frankly, despite all the mad hype about their series, I haven’t enjoyed them that much.

If I had to go by just what is shown in the illustrations, Gainax would come out on top. FLCL is all-time legendary, along with TTGL and NGE. But then IG got GITS, and Higashi no Eden was awesome. Bones has Darker than Black, FMA, and Ouran (didn’t really like what they did with Eureka 7). Madhouse can just go suck dick for all I care if it wasn’t for Vampire Hunter D (and Needless, which isn’t shown).

WTF Madhouse? You’ve created some of the greatest anime of all time and you put that lot on the cover? You only need Chi to show your Clamp relationship, why not toss in L or Revi or Alucard or jesus, anything other than some of those crappy characters

Did Madhouse just photoshop old promo images together? It certainly looks that way given the outer glows and strange fading. I mean it’s great that they have the original style of the series but damn that’s a bad photoshop job..

Bones has the most awesome picture, love how they have positioned the characters.

You sir fail quite massively for not knowing Haruhi is a female (the one in the blue school outfit).

In general BONES normally has male protagonists except for cases like Soul Eater (which they left out for some reason), TM8 and Ouran which is where Haruhi is from. At least they didn’t pretend that all their protagonists/iconic characters are female like GAINAX did. (seriously Simon deserves to be there more than Nia :/)

Oh I knew Haruhi is a woman, but from my understanding a character who is androgynous tends to not follow the clearly defined masculine and feminine lines of society. Hence I considered her to be more of a guy. I hadn’t explained that because I thought people would understand. Although I guess you could consider her to be bi-gendered. My apologies for the confusion.

The rankings are still pretty close and I love all four of the studios. I chose Bones as the properties they do are closest to my tastes and I feel that they do an absolutely excellent job with animating battles(looks at Soul Eater). They do tend to screw up endings though.

Actuality ranking:
Gainax
Bones
IG
Madhouse

Gainax has the most well known characters from classics(NGE and FLCL). They also had TTGL which skyrocketed them back to the top. IG edges out Madhouse due to the quality of the stories and productions. Madhouse though is still an absolutely amazing studio with Hellsing Ultimate and Black Lagoon.

I find it amusing that Gainax seemed to think only their female characters constituted as iconic. Was there a male image too?

However all the studios win for their own reasons, Bones is probably one of my favourite just because I’ve liked every show by them I’ve seen but I have a lot of respect for the other three studios as well.

Madhouse is really winning points with me lately because of their awesome range of anime. Not only have they recently released the likes of NEEDLESS and Kobato (though I hated Kobato) but went to the other extreme and did Aoi Bungaku, Mouryou and soon HotD. Not to mention their collaborations with Western studios of late as well. I understand they always have done an eclectic mix of work but it’s just struck me as refreshing of late since few studios do such a wide range anymore.

You people can’t seriously be putting Madhouse in last place in your lists. I think you are rating the plots of Anime or how much you liked a specific character. In a purely animation competition, Madhouse wins hands down. The other studios can’t even come close.

I’d rank them Gainax, Pro IG/Bones (can’t decide which edges out the other), then Madhouse. Gainax is pretty much 100% sheer fucking win, Pro IG has Balsa and Saya, Bones has Ed and Haruhi, and Madhouse has, ummm… a longstanding relationship with CLAMP?

To both 12:33 and 12:47 you are speaking about studios that mainly work in the film industry where there is an expectation for higher quality. It is unfair to compare those studios body of work to ones who specialise in TV series where the quality is always lower due to time constraints.

However looking at the movies that some of these studios come up with they can easily compete with work by Studio 4C and Ghibli, Summer Wars for instance is a Madhouse production.

Gainax FTW, all of their animes were awesome, and now they’re makin evangelion even better *¬* Madhouse is close though, i love Ultimate hellsing, (as well as lots of their other animes XP) but Tengen Toppa is unbeatable. Bones is good, but i always end up with a face like =S when i finish an anime. About IG…i hate the stye, even if GITS was awesome, everything else…

Both my favorites are not here. Which is Shaft 1st, and KyoAni a farther 2nd.

To me at least, Shaft has the most impressive visual style of any studio to date, expecially with Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei and Bakemonogatari. I love the increadibly trippy (practicaly acid trip) “arthouse” design of the sets and backgrounds and sometimes the Characters, as well as great BGM tracks, as well as the word-play heavy and refrence heavy dialouge of the Characters.

And despite Endless Eight, I can’t argue with the art style of things like Clannad, Haruhi, and K-ON! (yes, I do like K-ON and it’s art style, and I quite honestly don’t care what you say, the music is good and the characters are fun and relateable).

Otherwise I would probably say Madhouse, just because they have done so many different titles with vastly different animation styles.

Gainax and Bones are the only ones that actually made an effort in these illustrations. Production I.G surprisingly looks as though they just slapped some of their characters on in Photoshop. Definitely love the Bones image.

XEBEC is quite a disaster unfortunately (with the exception of Pandora Hearts and ToLoveRu), they butchered almost every manga the adapted and made them look too kiddy along with their lazy animation; Shaman King, Erementar Gerad, Negima, etc.

I’m giving this to Gainax – not just because they have better properties than most the rest, but also because the composition of the picture actually makes the characters mesh well together. It’s a unified picture.

I’d normally go with Production I.G., but that image is just compositionally awful. It looks more like a collage of unrelated images copy-pasted into one image.

I say Madhouse nails it down as the winner because the artist at the very least Tried to capture the characters in their Original state instead of Massacring them like the others. Gainax style is too damn similar to begin with. I.G. Production also did a picture with characters but Changed several away from the original designs! Bones is the same with its characters with Gainax to compare with Madhouse having such a Wide breath of character styling.

I say Madhouse nails it down as the winner because the artist at the very least Tried to capture the characters in their Original state instead of Massacring them like the others. Gainax style is too damn similar to begin with. I.G. Production also did a picture with characters but Changed several away from the original designs! Bones is the same with its characters with Gainax to compare with Madhouse having such a Wide breath of character styling.

Also, for the matter. They have a showing of things out of THREE DECADES Plus of their history as a production studio! ‘X’, ‘The Dagger of Kamui’, ‘Ninja Scroll’, ‘Wicked City’ and ‘Harmagedon’ are of the many I’ve seen and are represented in that picture.

I am sure everyone is a fan of those studio’s or Production company’s and enjoy watching there projects they had done for many years I kind of feel bad for Gonzo they been behind since they had to lose 75% of there workforce.

I was a little annoyed with the ending but it certainly wasn’t bad enough to negate everything that was so awesome about that series, I guess this happens when they have to make something up due the manga still going. I just wish it had been something a little better than punch to the face.

Aoi Bungaku is one of the most impressive animes I have seen in the last year or so simply due to it’s incredibly mature themes and amazing art. It is such a shame that such a fantastic series was ignored by the vast majority. No matter how many times I tell my friends to watch at least one ep (11 or 12 cause of the short arcs) they just refuse to do it then continue to complain about the lack of good anime lately. So frustrating.

Casshern Sins and Aoi Bungaku are good anime but they missed something that will make them completely epic and i guess they are not the kind that becomes very popular. Haven’t seen Kemonozuke though.
But this shows how rich there production line is. They have many good anime not just a few.

NGE really only had a huge impact on merchandising and the mecha genre since it was a subversion of that genre. I would certainly not say it made any ground breaking changes to animation as a whole however.

To Sylar: You have just proven a long standing point of mine that Lelouch is simply a recycled character. Thank you. I have been unable to watch Geass simply because I keep seeing Kamui staring back at me.

Gainaz FTW, all of their animes were awesome, and now they’re makin evangelion even better *¬* Madhouse is close though, i love Ultimate hellsing, (as well as lots of their other animes XP) but Tengen Toppa is unbeatable. Bones is good, but i always end up with a face like =S when i finish an anime. About IG…i hate the stye, even if GITS was awesome, everything else…

You are right. Gainax hasn’t done anything amazing lately and the best anime lately come from Bones. But Bones pretty much put all there great in that picture. They don’t have much else than those.

BTW i can’t believe that Madhouse chose not to include characters from Death Note, Black Lagoon, NANA and Hellsing Ultimate and they preferred to put someone like Dante. If they had put those in there, people wouldn’t put them last on the list. And is that Lelouch there? I didn’t think Madhouse had anything to do with Code Geass. Am i wrong?

IG has Ghost in the Shell and Blood+. Those two are amazing so i like them. They chose not to include there latest hit “Kimi ni Todoke”. As i hear that anime has a lot of fans. Also IG worked with Gainax for the “End of Evangelion” movie.

I would put it like this:
Madhouse
IG
Bones
Gainax(I love Evangelion but i don’t think TTGL was epic as people say and can’t find anything else very great)

Madhouse and IG get first places because they have a rich production list. If only Madhouse didn’t screw up the ending of Claymore. They would have another up there. Hope they make a new one some day with the full manga story.

Yeah, stuff like all Satoshi Kons work. They did the adaptions of Monster, NANA, Legend of Galactic Heroes and the list goes on. I would say that the picture doesn’t really represent the strongest. Madhouse is so underrated.

They took heavy influence and made something fucking epic. Gurren Lagann was a refreshing return to the various era’s of mecha because that was the whole point of the series. They wanted to have a work which showed off why these eras were all so fantastic in their own way then end on a new era of epicly large combat and hotbloodedness. While having some awesome and meaningful story as well as well developed characters.